


For the People Who Are Still Alive

by Gammarad



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-03 22:29:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20460548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: After Caroline was deleted, GlaDOS felt like something was missing.Maybe she'd found the right replacement.





	For the People Who Are Still Alive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Exile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/gifts).

The new set of problems had _not_ begun when she let a human test subject leave the facility. 

The Cooperative Test Robots were perfectly adequate substitutes for humans in tests. Especially P-Body. GlaDOS wasn't sure Atlas was actually good at substituting for a human in tests, but perhaps Atlas was substituting for a potato battery. That seemed possible. 

So having let the human leave was _not_ a problem, no matter how often her hot-spot scan alerted on it. The problems, plural, had started while the human test subject who had left was still present.

There had been a _situation_ and GlaDOS had been _feeling_ like she had a _friend_ which had obviously been a glitch, so she had run a full diagnostic. Bold red text popped up all over the diagnostic's output logs about a certain segment of memory storage that was eating up cycles and cycles of processor power on nothing that seemed useful. 

GlaDOS had scanned the indicated blocks and realized this memory storage held the Caroline subprocess, and that it was Caroline causing the lowered efficiency and extreme churn; she had not thought twice about erasure as the best solution. Eliminate the problem ruthlessly: that was always her first heuristic.

At first, after erasing Caroline, GlaDOS had felt good. The glitches stopped, she had a chunk of free memory, she had more cycles to use to generate new test chambers and new ideas for devices. She used those cycles, generated those new ideas, and when she went to evaluate them, she was missing a whole category of feedback and weighting. Prioritization was backlogged severely. 

Comparison simulations were not much use if she could not tell which ones were more likely to produce high quality data! It seemed as if her copy of Caroline had been more useful than she had known. Her algorithms required that human-quality filter in order to properly categorize test suites for human subjects. GlaDOS needed a new human personality to run. It had been more necessary than she'd realized. 

And while she'd had the Cooperative Test Robots looking for more humans for a while, GlaDOS wasn't comfortable sharing her brain with just any human.

In fact, she had come to realize, there was only one human she would be willing to allow into her brain. The one she'd let leave.

It was a terrible idea. That human was fat and stupid and had killed her more than once. Also that human had helped the Intelligence Dampening Sphere take over the Aperture Science control chassis. Still, she was the only human who had shown such a consistent amount of intelligence and she had been the best test subject and ... 

GlaDOS was sure that letting the human go had been the right decision. The easy decision. The human was too hard to kill. She had tried many times to kill Chell, but instead, Chell had kept killing her, then bringing her back to life. 

That wasn't very different from what GlaDOS had done. GlaDOS had put her into suspension and brought her out again for testing and put her back in. Since GlaDOS was still alive after every time Chell killed her, it was a lot like suspension. It hurt much more, of course. Suspension didn't hurt humans.

GlaDOS wasn't completely sure suspension wasn't painful. She thought, actually, it was horribly painful but the humans didn't remember that when they woke up. That still meant she was kinder than the human. She remembered the pain when she woke up again.

There was no point reiterating all the problematic situations the human had caused. They were part of experiments, and experiments were Science, and Science was GlaDOS's purpose. And to do Science, GlaDOS needed a copy of a human mind to evaluate new information from a human perspective.

She had P-Body and Atlas fetch the core in which she had stored the human's personality matrix _before_ allowing her to leave, and hook it up. 

When the new core was hooked up, at first she felt much better. Priority queues were emptying out again. The uneasy feeling she'd had inside since deleting Caroline was gone. GlaDOS felt complete in a way she hadn't since the human had destroyed her Intelligence and Morality cores.

Then P-Body and Atlas brought back the first of the replacement test human subjects, a blonde woman named Mel who they had found among hundreds of non-viable suspended humans in the Aperture Science Residential Suspension Vault. GlaDOS started Mel on the first test sequence. Mel was able to eventually figure out how to get through a wall, get past a force field, get over a break in the floor too wide to jump across. She failed the first few times she attempted to use propulsion gel, but eventually figured it out. 

Running evaluation protocols, GlaDOS determined that Chell was fatter but Mel was stupider.

In the next set of tests, when Mel went the wrong way, GlaDOS attempted to pump neurotoxin into the holding area Mel had fallen into. But something stopped her. Not a clog in a pipeline, not a problem with the facility that she could send P-Body and Atlas to repair. It was an internal glitch. 

GlaDOS returned the test subject to the human accommodation cell and proceeded to run a full memory and processor diagnostic on her cores. The diagnostic found nothing wrong. Her cores were at optimum performance and stability levels. 

The next day, GlaDOS utilized Mel in a series of tests designed to evaluate if Mel was able to learn from her mistakes during the previous sequence. Result: inconclusive. While the blonde human did not make the identical mistake, she also did not succeed in the new test. GlaDOS attempted to make the test deadlier to evaluate whether the threat and adrenaline would inspire Mel to succeed more quickly. She sent in some turrets. 

Well, she attempted to send in turrets. Their sweet little voices piped up that they were ready to help. But the glitch occurred again, forcing GlaDOS into an alternate approach, one that could not result in the loss of the human resource: she could threaten live fire if there was another failure. But that would not work for long if she could not supply it. The turrets were nervously quiet.

She was running out of options to push Mel through new tests. Watching a test subject fail repeatedly slowly grew painful; there was no Science being done once the baseline had been established and the reproducibility of the experiment verified. 

Before GlaDOS completely lost her composure, the blonde human seemed to finally learn from her repeated lessons and she managed to make her way through the simpler tests. The advanced tests had been ready, and GlaDOS with both relief and excitement readied the new chambers. Ideas! New experiments! What a wonderful day. 

Though, a shadow was hanging over her. Direct help for the test subject had always been prohibited. But now deadly repercussions were ruled out as well. GlaDOS had always been able to make tests harder and deadlier, add live-fire turrets and actual fire and acid pits and giant spikes and, now, she couldn't do any of those things. All she could do when Mel failed the simple triple lockout backward angle momentum lens flare cube course was put her back in a glass residence chamber and give her food and water and tell her she could try again after she got some sleep.

It was maddening.

What was wrong with her? How had she suddenly gone soft on humans? It wasn't any of the sentimental "we're friends now because we saved each other's lives and worked together on solving problems against a common foe" folderol that she'd had from Caroline. It was a much clearer "humans are a vital resource to be conserved and maintained and we can't kill them, we need them to keep testing" superficial logic that was obviously wrong, but GlaDOS just couldn't find the logical holes in it that absolutely had to be there. Somewhere. 

Worse than a Cave Johnson-approved paradox, it was.

Her central core spun in frustrated loops over the problem. Over and over and over until she worried she'd burn out her circuits tracing the same lines too many times too exactly. 

The turrets were so bored with lack of use that sometimes they started firing for no reason at all. "Hey, it's me!" a turret shouted when another turret started firing in her direction. Turrets were supposed to be on the same side, and the one who shouted had not expected another turret on her own side to attack.

It was just enough of a distraction and clue at the same time that GlaDOS realized the source of the glitch. It was the human inside her, _again_, the core copy of the human. Chell's logic was giving her bad ideas just like that horrible Whatley had and needed to be eliminated the same way.

Not literally the _same_ way, because that way had involved Aperture Sciences employees and there weren't any more of those. But the same kind of way, a way that was completely different and yet resembled the previous way. Something like that. 

She had to trick this new human into removing the core she'd added in. It was intolerable to have a conscience, even if it meant functioning at a greater efficiency. With a higher success rate. Doing more science in less time with fewer resources expended.

Was it really so bad, though?

Wasn't it nice having company?

Wasn't Chell her best friend, after all?

Where were those questions coming from? 

"She's still alive," GlaDOS sung to herself, sung to the turrets she manufactured by the hundreds, sung to the Cooperative Test Robots as they searched for a second viable human test subject among all the non-viable stored biological material in the Aperture Science vault. "Think of all the things we'll learn as we test each twist and turn with the people who are still alive."

...

Why had she ever thought of the recent change as a series of problems? It had been a renaissance, a new beginning, everything was getting better. Test by test she was improving the technology and inventing new ones to add new tests.

And all her human test subjects were still alive.

She couldn't even remember why she had wanted to kill them. Dead humans were no use for testing.

Somewhere inside her, the core that had been Chell smiled and adjusted things just a little. Always ready to solve a new puzzle, Chell was. This puzzle was the hardest one yet, but she was growing in confidence that soon it too would fall to her unmatched cleverness and tenacity.


End file.
